His hands stayed at his sides. His breath didn’t. “Catalina.” My name sounded like warning and the last good decision left in the room.
I ignored it. “Don’t say no yet.”
“I have not said anything.”
“You’re about to.” I kissed him before he could.
The kiss landed differently this time because I chose it.
His mouth was hot. I had known it would be. Knowing did nothing to prepare me for it. The heat moved under my skin in a fast, bright line, down my throat, across my chest, lower, until I felt it between my thighs and I was wet through my underwear before he had kissed me deeper. Every place he wasn’t touching became a place waiting to be touched.
For half a second, he didn’t move. Not away. Not closer.
He held himself still under my mouth. Thediscipline was violence turned inward.
Then his hand came up to my jaw, slow. I could’ve stepped back before it landed. His palm cupped my face. Fingers along my jaw. Thumb near the corner of my mouth. Holding. Nothing more. Letting me decide whether to stay.
I kissed him deeper.
The bond opened between us, all the way.
Heat. Want. The line he was holding. His and mine, tangled too tightly to label. My hands found his sweater, fingers curling into the soft black fabric over his chest, and the solid shape of him under my palms made everything below my ribs go liquid and furious and relieved all at once.
The sound he made against my mouth was small, rough and absolutely ruinous.
Then he kissed me back.
His mouth opened under mine. His tongue past the seam of my lips, slow and taking. The heat of him hit me harder. Cedar and smoke and the dark taste of his mouth, the drag of stubble against my chin, his teeth catching my lower lip on the way past. His hand slid from my jaw into my hair, fingers threading through the strands at the back of my head, the same place he had touched me on the balcony, the same place my body remembered with humiliating precision.
A small moan got out of me. Embarrassed. Involuntary.
His other hand flexed at his side but didn’t touch me. One hand in my hair, one hand held back by sheer will. The man was rationing himself while I was standing there melting through my own spine.
Rude.
Noble.
I pushed closer, though not much. Just enough for my body to meet his from chest to thigh.
He was hard against my belly. The line of him through two layers of fabric was unmistakable, and the heat of it landed in me lower than my hipbones, and I clenched around nothing at all.
Dominic’s hand tightened in my hair. One brief, involuntarypressure. Possessive. Then he loosened it immediately, like the instinct had burned him too.
My mouth broke from his for a breath, and he followed half an inch before he stopped himself.
I kissed him again, harder. Because I could. Because he was letting me. Because for once, the choice had started in my body and moved outward, and I wanted to know what it felt like to take something for myself.
It lasted four seconds, maybe five.
The room vanished.
The desk, the monitors, the locked compound, the council, Nate, Davis, Rhain, Yuki, every file and every rule and every terrible choice waiting outside the door became less real than the heat of his mouth and the controlled tremor in the hand at my jaw.
Then I stopped. His breathing was too controlled to be calm. Mine wasn’t controlled at all.
His eyes had gone dragon. Fixed on me like I was the only thing in the building still worth looking at.
“Show me,” I said.